22. Chapter 22
I brush paint over the canvas in front of me with a soft, stubborn whisper.
I’ve got the curtains half-drawn against the afternoon light, letting in enough glow to see what I’m doing without letting the world fully look back.
Paint stains my fingers; black under my nails and a smear of crimson across my knuckle where I wiped without thinking.
The canvas propped on the small table is… well, it’s something.
It’s not finished or even close to being so, but for the first time in days, I feel like my head has enough room to breathe.
This is my therapy now, I’ve determined. This is how I will keep myself from spinning out.
I mix a darker shade of red and apply it in rough strokes, building shadow where it doesn’t want to sit. The image taking shape is abstract enough that no one else would know what they’re looking at, but I do. I always do.
It’s a corridor with light and dark fractured into angles. A suggestion of a mask near the center if you look too long.
It’s the day I am supposed to be at my session with Alexander. And somehow I know that a storm is coming for me. I’ve built my life around that hour in the evening where I sit on a couch and tell a man things I’ve never told anyone.
A man who is also a monster.
I didn’t even bother to send him a message or cancel. I figure my absence would signal a pretty clean line in the sand and a boundary to be set. If any part of him gave a shit then he would respect it.
I sit down my brush and wipe my palm on my jeans, the plague charm swinging against my wrist as if it’s laughing at my choice. I’m busy scolding it mentally when a knock sounds off my door.
It’s probably Imogen for the umpteenth time checking in on me since I mentioned the therapy was over. The dead guy has her all up in arms, even if she can actively do nothing about it but stress herself out.
Sighing, I toss my brush into the can beside the canvas and pad over to the door, hurling it open to find that it is indeed not my best friend glaring up at me from the concrete below.
“Sadie.”
Yeah, I should have guessed his crazy ass would show up. Let’s be real honest—a part of me knew he would. He’s not the kind of man you ghost and expect to disappear.
I slam the door shut in his face and step back.
“Go away.” I try shouting through the door, but the words sound weak.
I clear my throat and try again, stronger. “Go the fuck away, Alex.”
There. I said it.
He said in the bar if I said it he would—I think he said he would. I can’t actually remember the exact phrasing. There is a stretch of silence and I’m reaching to peek through the curtained glass when he speaks.
“I’m coming in.”
The latch clicks and I scramble backwards, placing distance between us as he crawls up into the bus with me.
He wears the same black coat he had worn at the mall paired with a pair of black slacks that do wonders for him.
His hair is slightly wind-tossed, his eyes bright and cold in the dim light of my bus.
He closes the door behind him with a soft click and turns the lock.
Fuck.
I keep a healthy buffer between us as he wanders deeper and looks to the canvas and the mess of brushes. Studying it for a long moment before his gaze flicks to me and the bracelet at my wrist. I clock the satisfaction that crosses his expression the moment it does.
“What are you doing here?” I snap before he can comment on it.
“You weren’t at your session,” he says as if any of this is normal.
I bark out a laugh. “Congratulations on noticing.”
His eyes narrow slightly, like the sarcasm amuses him more than it irritates. “You didn’t cancel, Sadie.”
“I didn’t have to. I’m not—” I stop myself before I say your patient. Before I say your anything.
“You’re not what?” He hits it regardless.
“I’m not obligated to keep coming.”
He hums and relaxes back into the counter, one hand shoved casually into his pocket. A shining example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“You’re right, you are not obligated to come to the office.” Relief loosens me for all of a breath.
“So I came to you.”
And there it is—his crazy.
“No.”
“Yes,” he replies simply.
“You can’t—”
“I can, and I am.” He cuts me off without raising his voice. That’s the part that makes him worse, because he doesn’t have to be loud to dominate a room.
“This is insane.”
“Are you painting?”
I blink, thrown by the pivot in topic. “What? That’s all you got from this?”
“It’s what I see,” he murmurs, stepping toward the table as if he has the right to. His fingers hover near the edge of the canvas but he doesn’t actually move to touch it. “You planned your day around avoiding me, and yet here I am.”
“I planned my day around not walking into a trap,” I snipe.
His mouth curves faintly. “How did that work out for you?”
“Oh, fuck all the way off.”
“Don’t think I will,” he hums and relaxes against my counter again. I take a step toward him and regret it immediately because my body decides this exact moment to remember him in ways it shouldn’t. Heat crawls low in my stomach, tangled with rage like barbed wire.
“Don’t do that,” I warn, voice shaking.
“Do what?”
Right, I was the one who stepped forward.
“Stand there like you’re… calm. Like you didn’t lie to my face for weeks.”
He sighs, “I really did think we were past this. I didn’t lie to you, I withheld.”
“I stand corrected, you lied with better PR.”
He chuckles, amusement threading through his expression. “You didn’t come to your session because you’re angry.”
“That doesn’t take a therapist to figure out, Alex. What do people even pay you for outside of stating the obvious?” I grind out past the tightness in my jaw.
“It’s okay to be both angry and afraid, Sadie. It is only natural that you feel that way considering everything.”
“Oh please, you aren’t the voice of reason now. And I’m not scared of you.” I huff.
One step.
That’s all it takes for him to make the air change around me. His fingers raise and I stiffen as they land on my jaw.
“You should be,” he murmurs quietly.
“Not because I hurt you, but because you know what I am and still let me bend you six different ways around this bus.” He continues, tone deceptively even despite the words he spews.
“Fucking you and needing you are two entirely different things.”
He chuckles, his fingers gliding down to my pulse where it flutters just beneath the skin. “I know they are, but the great thing is you can do both at the same time.”
“I don’t want to do either,” I refute.
“That’s a lie, and we don’t do that anymore. Not with each other.”
I scoff. “I don’t know how many times we have to discuss this, but you don’t get to set what we are or aren’t anymore. The sex? It was nothing.”
He hums and slowly slides his hand to circle my throat, his thumb pressing into the bottom of my chin to tilt my head back. His eyes slide across my face like he’s able to see directly into my skull and pick it all apart.
“You were painting to regulate your nervous system.”
What?
“Don’t change the subject.”
“You’re avoiding my office because it doesn’t feel neutral anymore. So we don’t use the office.” He murmurs.
“You can’t bulldoze through what I just said because it’s not what you want to hear!” I scoff.
“You don’t get to disappear, Sadie.”
A chill slides through me at the warning in his tone. “I can, and you can watch me do it.”
Something dark slithers into his gaze beneath the calm. “If you run, I will follow.”
“Don’t threaten me,” I whisper in face of that darkness.
“I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you what will happen.”
I glare up at him, chest heaving through the thickening tension between us. “So what, you think you can just—move therapy into my bus?”
His gaze finally tears from mine to flick around the space.
“It will have to do.”
Rage bursts again through me. “Get out of my bus.”
“No,” he repeats.
I shove him back again and he falls back a step, and I hate that a part of me knows he let me do it.
“I swear to God, if you don’t leave, I will scream. I will call Imogen. I will—”
“You won’t,” he slices.
The certainty in his voice makes my throat tighten around my next breath. “Because you don’t want witnesses. Not yet, at least. Not when you’re still deciding what this is to you.”
“Just get out, Alex. You—you don’t get to do the psychoanalyzing bullshit when I am very clearly telling you what I want.”
“Sit,” he commands, the words gentle.
My skin prickles and I shift angrily on my feet. “No. I won’t.”
His gaze flicks to the couch-length bench then back to me.
“Stand,” he offers.
My breath stutters in an echoed act of that mirrored room.
“Or we can move on. Together.”
I hold my ground, folding my arms to my chest.
“You aren’t welcome here.”
He hums and pushes away, his expression unreadable as he heads for the door. I watch each step away from me, ignoring the piece of me that wants to grab him and drag him back. To tell him to keep fighting with me, because fighting is better than being left alone again.
But we can’t do this.
It’s toxic and wrong on so many levels.
The door closes behind him and I let the silence swallow me whole. Trying to be okay with the choice I have made.